The first Hatchet movie starred actress Tamara Feldman as final girl Marybeth Dunston, but the role was recast with Danielle Harris for Hatchet 2. When Hatchet came along in 2006, it's safe to say the slasher sub-genre was in need of a shot in the arm. Thankfully, director Adam Green's film proved to be just that, providing a visually striking killer, gory deaths full of brutality, funny comic relief, and a cast full of talent, including horror icons like Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, and Tony Todd.
After Hatchet proved successful, it was a no-brainer than Green would eventually make a follow-up. Sequel Hatchet 2 arrived in 2010, offering fans more of everything they loved about the first film. Well, almost everything, as original star Tamara Feldman didn't come back to reprise the role of Marybeth, the seeming lone survivor of Victor Crowley's rampage through New Orleans' Honey Island Swamp. Instead, noted scream queen Danielle Harris was brought in to take over the character, who heads back into Crowley's lair to retrieve her father and brother's remains.
Considering Feldman and Harris look absolutely nothing alike, and how famous Harris is within the genre community, her becoming Marybeth was a somewhat jarring change, although not necessarily an unpleasant one. As one might imagine though, Marybeth wasn't just recast on a whim.
Why Hatchet 2 Recast Marybeth Dunston With Danielle Harris
Thankfully for fans wondering why Marybeth was recast for Hatchet 2, director Adam Green explained the situation during an interview with MTV News, right before the sequel arrived in theaters in 2010. Here's his full quote:
The simple answer is that it wasn't gonna work out. I think she was taking some bad advice in handling herself in a bad way with us. Towards the middle of making Frozen we started talking about moving in another direction with that role. It's a very hard thing to do when you replace an established character with a different actor, but we were faced with a problem. We planned Hatchet II before we did Hatchet. We had this whole storyline planned out and were going to start the movie on the same frame the other one ended on. We were like, "Do we change all of that because this pretty much unknown actress is being difficult right now"? So instead we thought "How do we go upwards and onwards and recast her with somebody the fans are going to be even more excited about?"
I'm happy to see how well that's worked because Danielle Harris actually auditioned for that role the first time around, but at that time I had already cast Hodder and Todd and so many horror icons in the movie that I felt like one more would make it all about that. So we went with an unknown. I'm happy to see that in all the reviews that have come out, everybody completely loves her and has embraced her and there hasn't even been mention that the part was recast.
While Green doesn't reveal exactly what Tamara Feldman did to deserve being dumped from Hatchet 2, it doesn't take much reading between the lines of his answer to come to the conclusion that the actress' ego might have been her own worst enemy. It sounds a lot like she got a bit too big of a head, and ended up becoming a bigger liability to Green and company than she was an asset. If that's the case, one might wonder why he then cast a known name who might have had an even bigger ego, but since Green said Danielle Harris came close to getting the role the first time, it's likely he'd talked with her enough to know what he'd be getting on set.
Harris remains a well-liked figure in the horror genre community, and unlike most recastings, it seems like there's more fans who prefer her version of Marybeth Dunston to the original take by Feldman. For those curious what happened to Feldman, who also sometimes acts under the name Amara Zaragoza, she's had a decent career since Hatchet, booking a lot of recurring or guest roles on TV shows like Supernatural, Dirty Sexy Money, and Gossip Girl, and being a regular on the recent CBS All Access series Strange Angel. Still, one wonders if she would have become a bigger star had she stayed Hatchet's leading lady.